Is there something wrong with the following?
Reality: That's the Washington Examiner. Far, far from neutral.
My guess is that the above omits some facts which would clarify better what happened in these cases. It appears that in both cases the criminal is now in custody and faces prosecution, so the system does work at least partly, to catch the "worst of the worst" criminals, though it appears superficially that there's a bias toward releasing criminals if they're immigrants. Or rather, there is some mishandling of some such cases. Maybe very few such cases, and yet these get exaggerated into something sensationalist, to feed the populist frenzy to find villains somewhere to beat up on.
No, there is no such bias. The reality is the Republicans love to claim to be tough on crime--but it's always about throwing heavy sentences regardless of circumstances, but not actually providing the means of doing so. Criminals get released because the system is overloaded--they keep complaining about weak prosecutors but the capacity simply doesn't exist.
How typical are these cases of leniency to violent criminals? There's an impression that there are probably hundreds or even thousands of such cases (immigrants committing violent crimes) happening right now, and many of these criminals let back out onto the streets and likely to strike again, and that the crime rate is higher because of this -- all due to this bias in some states/cities to release violent criminal suspects if they are immigrants.
It is very much not representative. It's pretty clear this administration asked an AI for a list of non-citizen criminals--and got back the usual AI slop. Anyone ever named in a criminal complaint, even if only as a witness. Anyone with any sort of paperwork issue, regardless of fault. I have been an "overstay" in Romania (back in Iron Curtain days) because their official wrote down the wrong number. But, despite being a police state they were sane about it, my mother and the official ended up communicating in very broken German and he realized we had done no wrong. Would that matter to the current administration? Probably not. And something happened that caused my wife to get a notice to appear for a deportation hearing at [to be scheduled]. It was never scheduled so we did not find out what triggered it--at the time she was adjusting her status to permanent resident and something must have glitched. Again, would this administration care? I don't think it will become an issue as she's a citizen now--legally it's impossible to deport her as there's nowhere to deport her to (she holds no other citizenship), but I'm not sure that would stop these clowns.
And yet this makes no sense. No prosecutors or law enforcers intentionally want to see violent criminals released because they're immigrants. What possible hidden or ulterior motive could they have? If they want to pander to public demand for something, they'd do everything to get those criminals convicted, or deported, or anything other than just release them back to the streets.
It makes no sense because it isn't happening.
The only part that's actually real is states not notifying the Gestapo about releasing those who do not have legal status. And there's a good reason for this, "sanctuary" cities and states are those who recognize that society functions better if people do not fear contact with law enforcement. Yes, an occasional criminal gets released that should be deported, but the flip side is many other things get handled smoothly. The person without status who can get a driver's license and insurance is better than the person driving uninsured because they can't work with the system. And said person will not consider a traffic stop as dangerous.
What's the real cause of the anti-immigrant hysteria?
I think it can be shown that Democrats/liberals/progressives are more to blame than the immigrant-bashing right-wingers. Though the latter are deluded, yet they do have a reasonable demand for stricter enforcement of the immigration laws, which almost everyone agrees with (i.e., everyone agrees that the law should be better enforced). The difference between the Right and the Left is that the Right is now doing an aggressive full thrust toward enforcement, unlike before when everyone seemed to recognize the economic need for the immigrant labor, which the letter of the law disregarded by demanding unrealistic obstructions to immigrant workers.
No. The problem is the hate. On average, the immigrants are a plus for society. The fact that they were able to come here screens out most who would be a burden for society, they commit fewer crimes (other than status-related things) than citizens, they are less likely to be a welfare burden etc.
The fact that someone will relocate to a foreign land actually says a lot about them. This highly selects for those who can do--they are confident enough of themselves to be willing to isolate themselves from the support they had in their own society. Everywhere you look immigrants average better than locals, and any place with heavy emigration suffers from their loss. Doesn't even have to be foreign lands, you see the same forces at work in the inner cities (we say "white flight" but it's not--it's the ones that see the problem early and get out), we see it at work in rural America.
There is hysteria and hate by both the Left and Right. The Left has deliberately left in place very restrictive immigration barriers (employment barriers), and when these barriers are circumvented (out of economic necessity), they unleash their hate against the employers as the villain, because the Left has a basic hate for employers, or rather, those employers who pay competitive wages rather than artificially-high wages demanded by labor unions.
The left is much more liberal about employment than the right.
And you're missing the fact that under-the-table workers get mistreated. I'm thinking of the place that she used to stop by occasionally to buy duck feet. During Covid it vanished--but later I find out it wasn't done in by Covid, but because the owner hadn't been paying the employment taxes and worker's compensation for those working under the table. He owed the state millions.
Left-wing talk-show host Thom Hartmann repeatedly blames employers as guilty and imagines that crackdowns on them would solve most of the illegal immigration problem. Heavy fines and even imprisonment of callous employers -- it's always some dirty capitalist who is to blame for whatever is wrong. And he blames Reagan for having changed federal policy of enforcing the law to punish the employers. But this too would be just another artificial interference with the market, which left to itself responds efficiently to the consumer demand, and that demand can best be satisfied with increased immigrant labor, not a crackdown on employers, which hurts everyone. Equal enforcement of the labor laws for domestic or immigrant labor is reasonable, but not interference with the competition from immigration. More competition is always better.
I don't listen to talk shows. But this is a very simplistic solution. The reality is that most of them are working on forged paperwork. The employer might suspect but if they act on suspicion that means that legal immigrants become pretty much unemployable. And we lack adequate means of verification--a crackdown on forged paperwork will end up with them working on stolen identities rather than being driven out. Under-the-table, yes, go after the employers. Otherwise, solve identity theft first. And there is a lot of opposition from the left about H1-B visas--because while in theory they are only supposed to be hired if they can't find a citizen and are to be paid competitively that is very far from reality.
Personally, I'd scrap the current labor approach completely. Instead, it becomes legal to hire non-residents so long as the unemployment in the field is below some threshold and the unemployment in the area is below some threshold. And employers have to pay say a 10% tax on hiring them.
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